Editor’s Note: For background on this article, check out the first article in this series, Microsoft’s BPOS: Cloud Computing’s Silver Lining?
Here’s the truth: a ton of documentation has been written around Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Microsoft’s cloud-based messaging and communication platform. Most of this documentation is very succinct and worth reading as you dig into adopting BPOS services. But when it comes to managing BPOS, the admin has a remarkably easy job. Yes, there are elements of the platform that can require some serious technical skills, particularly in the LAN configuration and large-scale migration stages, but in terms of application and user management, BPOS is an admin’s dream. All of the heavy lifting is performed back in Microsoft’s data centers. By and large, the admin has only two tasks: adding users and assigning services to those users.
If this sounds too easy to be true, believe it. This author, a non-IT professional, tried out two admin BPOS accounts over the past month and can attest that, at least at a small business level, BPOS is simple enough for practically anyone to manage. For larger organizations, the simplicity of Microsoft’s platform translates into far less hours spent on traditional management tasks. That means higher ROI up front on IT hours and even more rewards down the road as less “stuff” goes wrong and workers have more uptime.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at BPOS from an administrator’s perspective. What’s entailed in starting the BPOS experience? What does it take to manage services for users? We’ll make this a quick tour but ensure you leave with a fairly comprehensive idea of what’s in store for BPOS managers as they transition from on-premise servers to Microsoft’s services-based model.
Your first task in preparing for a BPOS deployment is to ensure platform compatibility with all client devices. On the software side, the operating system is simple enough: Windows XP (Professional or Tablet Edition, both SP2), Windows Vista (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, or Home, all SP1), or MacOS X 10.5. (For those curious about domain attachment under Vista Home, BPOS doesn’t sync its login and password with the Windows Domain, keeping authentication separate from the OS.) You’ll also need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 on Windows systems and Java client 1.4.2 or newer on Macs.
For browsers, Microsoft recommends at least Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3.1.2 (on OS X), or Firefox 3, although Firefox won’t support the Microsoft Online Services Sign In tool. Email clients must be Outlook 2007 or Entourage 2008, and the platform supports Windows Mobile 6, Nokia E and N series, and iPhone (firmware 2.0) handsets. For hardware, practically any system made in the last five years will do. All you need for Vista is a machine with at least a 1 GHz Pentium and 1GB of RAM, and for Windows XP you’ll want at least a 500 MHz Pentium and 256MB of RAM.
That’s the easy part. Now, if your company employs a firewall or proxy server, you’ll likely have some port tweaking to do, so we recommend you consult the TechNet document. Scroll down this page and you’ll also find a description of how to compute the network bandwidth required by different BPOS applications. For medium or larger companies, this can be a serious consideration since all of the network traffic for messaging that had previously been confined to the high-speed LAN is now going to flow through gateways and over slower conduits into the Internet cloud.
The good news is that you probably don’t need to assess your full bandwidth needs right out of the gate. Very few businesses decide to turn their entire operation over to BPOS en masse on day one. A more likely course would be to take a large workgroup or division and start them on BPOS, learn from their deployment and usage, then expand the installation base in stages.

If you’re still undecided about BPOS and what it will require from you in terms of management, give the 30-day free trial a spin. You can get a full-featured, 20-license, totally no-charge eval from mocp.microsoftonline.com.
Getting started with BPOS will require the subscriber to have a Windows Live ID. We’re not sure why this is so, since at no other point after registration does a Windows Live ID come into play if you supply an alternative email account for Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal communications. Still, there it is, and getting an ID is free at signup.live.com. Remember to click through the confirmation message that Microsoft will drop into the email account you provide.
As a first-time visitor, you’ll see that the Customer Portal offers either Office Live Meeting or Business Productivity Online (BPOS). If you’re only interested in presentations, then Live Meeting may be all you need, but most likely you’re here for the whole BPOS package, so click on “Sign in” in the top-right corner, sign in with your Windows Live ID, and fill out your contact and company info in the My Profile wizard. Now flip over to the Services tab, put a check next to Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, and click Add to cart. Proceed to checkout, read the terms and conditions, check the acceptance box, and click I Accept. Microsoft then issues a confirmation number and sends an email.
Next you proceed to activation. You’re prompted for a company name for MS Online services, such as “yourcompany.” Microsoft slightly modifies the name and turns it into a subdomain, such as yourcompany1.microsoftonline.com. Then comes the service administrator contact info form followed by a summary.
When all the formalities are done, you’ll notice an entry under the Customer Portal Subscriptions tab: 20 licenses for BPOS Standard with a status of “Activation in Progress.” (Note that the admin account does not count toward these 20 licenses. It is, in effect, a “free” account, albeit one with limit functionality.) In a few minutes, Microsoft emails your Live ID address with further instructions. Also, you’ll see a few more options listed in the Subscriptions tab’s Actions pull-down menu and your Status will have changed to Service Active.
As the instructions note, you’ll need credentials to access the BPOS administration account . So select Get Credentials and record the username and temporary password. Your username (admin) stays in place, but when you login for the first time, you’ll need to select a new password. Note that Microsoft won’t accept a weak or medium-strength password here. You must select a strong password using Microsoft’s criteria.
Now we’re getting to the real administrative meat. Notice that the Home tab of admin.microsoftonline.com shows you subscribed to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, with both services showing as healthy and all features available. You still haven’t enabled Office Communications Online or anything else, but the first thing you should do at this point is establish a second admin account. If anything takes the admin away from the office, the business still needs someone with full privileges on hand to run BPOS services. Dig into the Users tab and select the User List subtab. Under Actions, click Add new user. Note: While writing this article, we found that this step worked fine under Internet Explorer but stalled under Google Chrome. Those software requirement specs are serious.
The new user wizard asks you to input contact info, select whether to give the user admin privileges, then select an Exchange mailbox size. (The default is 5GB; the maximum is 25GB out of the 100GB allocated to a Standard subscription.) Once you click to create/finalize, you’ll find that one license has been deducted from your available license count. You’ll also see the new admin account shown on the User List, and clicking on the Display name will let you go in and make any contact or setting changes you please.
As you can see, creating users only takes a minute or two, so creating a handful of accounts during a trial is no big deal. But when the time comes to start bringing dozens or hundreds of accounts over, you’re going to want a more automated approach. In the Users / Overview subtab, you’ll find an “Import users from a file” link under Actions. The file in question must be in CSV format. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here. Simply download Microsoft’s offered .csv file template or file (or both) and follow the example shown.
Another option for provisioning large user groups into BPOS is through any of several migration tools. As we mentioned in a prior BPOS article, there are plenty of third-party tools and partners ready to help with migration from outside platforms, such as Lotus Notes or Groupwise. If your company is using on-premise Exchange, you have three tools all set to launch from the AdministrationCenter’s Migration tab: e-mail coexistence, directory synchronization, and mailbox content migration. E-mail co-existence has on-premise Exchange Server and Exchange Online running in tandem so that some users will have their data hosted locally while others are in the cloud. Directory synchronization copies all email-enabled user accounts to Microsoft’s Online Services directory as well as synchronizing your local Global Address List with Exchange Online. Mailbox migration completes the setup BPOS trifecta by transferring users’ email (Exchange Server or POP3/IMAP4) contents to their Exchange Online accounts.
Many businesses starting out with BPOS will want to co-locate their messaging, keeping data resident both on-premise and in the cloud until ready to commit to an online-only model. One-way Active Directory synchronization is a relatively easy way to start this process, and from there it’s a quick step to download the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools (in either 32- and 64-bit versions). Be sure to look into the Windows PowerShell cmdlets embedded in the Migration Console which can help to more efficiently script transfers.
We strongly advise reading Microsoft’s Migration Toolkit document collection, which will guide you from pre-migration surveying through known issues and even includes a handy user tracking spreadsheet. Similarly, don’t overlook Microsoft’s ample Online Services help documentation, where you’ll find useful tidbits such as the fact that one 5,000-object mail account will require about 45 minutes for an initial synchronization and five minutes for subsequent synchs. Without such facts, you have little idea how to schedule migration stages.
Many users are familiar with personal distribution lists created in Outlook—essentially a pre-configured collection of email recipients. The trouble with personal distribution lists is that only their creator can use them. Exchange distribution lists can be used by anyone, making it simple to communicate with workgroups, divisions, or even the whole company.
From the AdministrationCenter site, go to the Service Settings tab, Exchange Online subtab, click on Distribution Lists, then select New distribution list. In the pop-up screen, you’ll need to fill in a name and email alias for the list. (Note the “Allow external senders” check box. While convenient in some scenarios, this feature could pose a security and spamming risk, so use it carefully.) On the next screen, you get to populate your list. The List type pull-down menu offers three choices: users, contacts, and pre-existing distribution lists. You’ll need to select these individually and add whichever recipients you want to the right side of the screen.
Differentiating between users and contacts can come in handy when you need to involve people outside of the company, such as on a multi-company project. To add contacts, go to the Exchange Online / Contacts area and use the Add new contact link under Actions. Also under Exchange Online, you’ll see links for the Safe senders and Blocked Senders lists. Under these, don’t miss the Conference Rooms link. Conference Rooms are much like distribution lists except that they group email addresses with calendar time slots and correlate these to physical meeting rooms within your company. As the admin, you can automatically book these rooms or task their management to certain users.
One small but immensely helpful part of BPOS is the Microsoft Online Services Sign In tool, a sort of dashboard applet the gives end-users one-click access to their BPOS services. From the AdministrationCenter site (admin.microsoftonline.com), you can see the Sign In tool available for download in the Downloads area. Simply download the tool, run the installer, and walk through the wizard. This can be repeated on every end-user’s system. The one instance when you may not want to use the Sign In applet is if multiple users share the same system. If one user makes changes to the Sign In application, these will apply when other users log in with their own accounts. To avoid confusion in such cases, it might be best to have users log in via the Microsoft Online Customer Portal (MOCP) site (mocp.microsoftonline.com) and enter their credentials with each logon, always remembering to log out when finished. This is more cumbersome for users but potentially less of a headache for admins.
On the other hand, the Sign In application can save admins time by auto-configuring client applications for use with Microsoft Online Services. In this case, that means Outlook. (You might recall that BPOS is compatible with Outlook Web Access, Microsoft’s browser-based mail client, but Microsoft recommends a locally installed version of Outlook for a better experience.) The Sign In tool will create a new profile in Outlook tied to the user’s BPOS account. Whenever the user loads Outlook, he or she will be prompted to select a profile from a pull-down menu. This way, both the prior account data and the new BPOS data remain accessible through a single instance of Outlook.

We were also very impressed with the Sign In tool’s ability to detect configuration issues and easily remedy them. In the images here, you can see that our Live Meeting application was improperly configured. The Sign In tool alerted us to this fact, forced us to close down all instances of Internet Explorer, then made the necessary adjustments, finishing with a system tray pop-up telling us of the reconfiguration’s success.
Beyond this, there’s very little for an admin to do with the Sign In tool. Under the Options tab, you’ll find some sign in preferences. You can disable the remembering of the user name and password for security reasons, although this defeats half of the application’s convenience. Under Advanced Options, you may want to enable data logging if application or system stability has been a problem.

Of all the BPOS applications, SharePoint, the group project collaboration application, is no doubt the most feature rich as well as the most detailed to administer. That’s not to say that it’s difficult, only that there are many more options available than in other BPOS services.
To create a SharePoint Online site, head to the Service Settings tab, SharePoint Online subtab, and select New under the Site Collections area. Up pops a standard BPOS creation screen. Fill in your contact info, being sure to use your admin account email address, and after a minute SharePoint Online should show a confirmation screen. The new site will now appear under Site Collections. When you click on the site name, another pop-up appears with two tabs, one for properties and one for permissions. Click into the permissions tab and select the first link to begin adding users. It’s also a good idea to select at least one additional administrator as a backup. You can grant an end-user full control of a SharePoint site without giving that user full admin privileges to BPOS as a whole.
From here, much of the “administration” for SharePoint Online blends into the general tasks done by a site owner. As such, you can access Share Site administration tasks either through the AdministrationCenter site (under Service Settings > SharePoint Online > Site Collections > Go To Site) or via login through the MOCP site. On the main MOCP page you’ll find an area called Company Intranet that lists all SharePoint sites. If the user has admin permissions for a site, he can click the Site Actions pull-down menu in the top-right corner of the screen, choose Site Settings, then get access to four columns of possible options and features: Users and Permissions, Look and Feel, Galleries, and Site Administration.
Stepping through the 25 different links present in these columns would consume an entire article. A lot of it revolves around tweaking the appearance of things—whether navigation should be shown in Tree View or Quick Launch formats, what sorts of content can be on the site, the various Web Parts available to the site, and so on. You will probably want to delve into the Advanced permissions area to assign site users Read, Contribute, Design, or Full Control permissions. However, instead of being overlong and repetitive with these settings, we instead wanted to spotlight just a few cool things you can do with SharePoint Online from a usage perspective.
Go back to the Site Actions pull-down menu and select Create. Let’s start with the left column, Libraries, and create a wiki. If you’ve never created a wiki before, but at least know from Wikipedia how useful and dynamic a wiki can be for cataloging and cross-linking a wealth of information, then you’ll find this feature as accessible as it is exciting. After you enter a name and description for the wiki site (and select whether or not the document should display on the Quick Launch), a couple of boilerplate pages (Home and How to Use) are automatically created. Then you can feel free to start adding, editing, and deleting pages with the integrated WYSIWYG editor. If this is your first time through SharePoint’s wiki generator, start at the View All Pages link. This will provide a clearer view of how to create new pages and format them through the Settings pull-down. Peek under the Actions pull-down and you’ll see that SharePoint Online can export and synchronize wiki content through several means, including spreadsheets and RSS feeds.

Flip to the far right column, Web Pages, and pick the Sites and Workspaces link. With this, rather than mess with maintaining an outside blog, companies can host as many as they like right within SharePoint. Simply look under the Template Selection area’s Collaboration tab and select Blog. Be sure to fill in the title, description and URL name fields. (The URL name is merely the name of the sub-folder in which the blog’s assets will be stored.) In most instances, it will be fine to accept the default options, including keeping the same user permissions as the parent site. Once the blog is created, you’ll see a short list of Admin Links on the right side of the page. These include the usual creation and management areas, but note the link on the bottom, Launch blog program to post. Clicking through this will register the blog with Microsoft Word and launch its Blog Post template—a nifty short-cut for integrating a much more comfortable post editor.
Another great tool is the survey creator, located in the center column, Tracking. Supply a survey name and description, answer whether the survey should appear on the site’s Quick Launch line, decide if survey takers should be kept anonymous, what types of answers you’ll accept, and several more criteria. After a few minutes, you’ll have your survey questions defined, the answer formats and defaults, and a concluding screen that will allow you, the admin, to either continue editing or manage the survey within the site.
Two links up from Survey is Project Tasks, the essential scheduling tool for anyone or any group that has ever hit the organizational limits of Outlook. Project Tasks creates a Gantt chart, allowing you to create a list of pending events and tie durations, priorities, owners, and more to each item, then view it all in a single overview screen. We suspect that Project Tasks alone may justify the cost of SharePoint Online in some workgroups.
For the admin, Live Meeting is nearly a non-concern. There are a few items you can tend to, but most of the work falls on the shoulders of whoever is running actual meetings.
You access Live Meeting settings under the Service Settings tab, Live Meeting subtab, then by clicking the Administer Live Meeting link. This will spawn a new browser window showing an Adminster area on the left. By now, you should have a fair idea of how BPOS handles account settings, groups, storage allocations, and so forth. It’s all pretty straightforward. The Roles and Policies area has a few interesting twists to it, though.
For starters, admins can opt to uncheck the “Enable recording to participant’s computer” option. If a meeting happens to contain sensitive material, not giving viewers the ability to save the presentation could be helpful. (Obviously, there are many ways to record on-screen, browser-based events, but there’s no point in making it easier for people unless you want it to be easy.) You can set content to expire any time up to 90 days after the event, plus admins can restore recordings for up to 90 days after deletion. Essentially, Microsoft is giving access to event data for up to half a year, further taking some storage burden off of the subscribing company. Also note that admins can restrict or totally disallow the file types of handouts given to participants during a Live Meeting. If company rules restrict sharing of spreadsheet documents, for instance, this is the place to make sure that presenters don’t accidentally slip and break policy.
Note that one of the reasons Microsoft recommends installing the local version of Outlook is for its ability to integrate with Live Meeting. After configuring with the Sign On tool, Outlook will have a new toolbar. One of the buttons on this bar is labeled Schedule a Live Meeting. Pull down the Live Meeting Service option and fill out an appointment request. When accepted, the Live Meeting slot will then populate the recipients’ calendars.
Office Communicator is the instant messaging component of BPOS. It might seem odd that the application doesn’t appear as a default program enabled alongside Exchange and SharePoint, but this has mostly to do with an early incompatibility between Microsoft Office Communications Online and the on-premise edition of Office Communicator 2007. Specifically, an end-user with Office Communicator 2007 configured for use with Office Communications Online will be unable to IM with other users inside the company using on-premise Communicator. When you want to migrate the company onto BPOS, you’ll need to have everyone using the same server model—local or cloud, but not both.
BPOS requires the use of Office Communicator 2007 R2, which is currently a free download from Microsoft. Having this installed is the first step for enabling Office Communications Online. The second is to enter the AdminCenter, go to the Service Settings tab, Office Communications Online subtab, and hit the Enable button. With this done, the user must exit the Sign In tool, then reload it. The tool will now integrate the new service and show an entry for Communicator. Back in the AdminCenter’s Office Communications Online area, you’ll see a Disable button, but think carefully before using this. Re-enabling Communicator for on-premise use will require help from Microsoft Online Service and render the user unable to IM with other users still using the client configured for BPOS.
The hardest part of Office Communicator for admins is simply setting it up. Honestly, the tool is very similar to conventional consumer IM clients. You can send text messages, set your own presence status (away, busy, online, etc.), make video chat calls, and all the usual functions. However, there are two ways in which Communicator differentiates itself under BPOS. First, all communications are encrypted, so the application is more secure for business-level needs. Second, there are a few ways in which Communicator can mesh with other Microsoft Online Services, not the least of which is synching your presence status with your calendar.
For example, a user can use Communicator to IM via a SharePoint site. To enable this, start within a Share site and click the Site Actions pull-down menu. Choose Edit Page. This will bring up the page in editing mode. Depending on the site’s elements and layout, you’ll see yellow bars at the top of different sections labeled Add a Web Part. Click the one above Announcements. The Add Web Parts dialog box will now appear. Scroll down the list, check Site Users, then click Add. Just below the Site Actions pull-down, click the Exit Edit Mode link. The Share site will now feature a list of site users accessible via Communicator.
There are a couple of noteworthy admin-type tasks you can perform in Communicator. For starters, you can import Exchange distribution lists. This can be a great time-saving short-cut rather than recreating the same groups one by one in Communicator. (Tip: You can save more time by dragging contacts into Communicator rather than creating them from scratch.) The other handy admin step is to change IM contact access levels. This modifies how much information others can see about the user. Within Office Communicator, right-click on any contact, select Change Level of Access, then pick from one of five options: Personal (all contact info is visible), Team (work, mobile, and schedule info is visible), Company (contact info and limited schedule visibility), Public, (limited contact info and status visibility), and Blocked (limited contact info but Offline status shown). Having granular per-viewer control over one’s displayed information rather than a single, universal setting can help weed out unwanted attention and keep users more productive.
We’ve covered a lot of ground here and shown many ways in which admins play a key role in deploying and managing BPOS. Nevertheless, you can probably tell that, compared to conventional software implementations, the job of managing BPOS is minimal. The initial data migration is likely the most complex part of the administration process. Once this is done and users are up and running, IT responsibilities for BPOS support are fairly nominal.
Of course, issues can happen even under the best circumstances. Be aware that end-users cannot receive support directly from Microsoft, although the designated service administrator can via the AdministrationCenter’s Support tab. During our evaluation, we never had cause to submit a service request, but Microsoft assures us that a considerable amount of resources have been put in place to ensure that all service requests are handled “very promptly.” Interestingly, though, you can designate the impact of your support issue in a pull-down menu within the service request, picking options ranging from “minor inconvenience” to “site down.” 24x7 toll-free phone support is available, as well.
As stated before, Microsoft’s documentation on BPOS is expansive, which is doubly impressive considering how new the platform is. The online Help files and Support Knowledge Base can resolve many issues, plus you can delve into Microsoft’s TechCenter, BPOS team blog, and community forums, all of which are accessible via the AdministrationCenter’s Support page.
Now more than ever, businesses are looking for ways in which to minimize their “pain points.” If the cost and time factors of IT administration qualify as pain points, then BPOS should offer some significant pain relief. Once again, give the 30-day trial a shot. We found that initial setup took less than an hour with very minimal expertise necessary. Once they see the advantages of BPOS first-hand, we suspect many businesses will find few reasons to continue their old on-premise messaging and collaboration models.


















